Stop Gerrymandering with Multi-Member Districts

Electing 3-5 members of Congress in larger districts, with ranked voting, would work better than redistricting reform

Many states have reformed the process of drawing single-member political districts by taking the redistricting out of the hands of self-interested politicians and assigning the task to non-partisan commissions. That helps, to an extent.

The challenge is that Americans increasingly live in either dense urban areas or sprawling rural areas where neighbors tend to share similar political views. Unless you chop those communities up (which has real downsides), you get lopsided political districts that are safe seats for one party or the other. Even if you draw the lines fairly, you get little competition in most places.

A better approach might be to have much larger geographic districts that elected three to five representatives each, and to let voters rank their choices of candidates in order of preference.

> districts that send multiple members to Congress — was the norm at the nation’s founding. Nine states still use multimember districts to fill at least one state legislative chamber, and four — Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota and Washington — elect all their state lawmakers this way.